Spiritual Biographies

C. S. Lewis is one of the most influential Christian writers of our time. "The Chronicles of Narnia" has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide and all Lewis's works are estimated to sell 6 million copies annually. At the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis expert Devin Brown brings the beloved author's story to life in a fresh, accessible, and moving biography through focusing on Lewis's spiritual journey.

Kathleen Norris had written several much loved books, yet she couldn't drag herself out of bed in the morning and couldn't summon the energy for her daily tasks. Even as she struggled, Norris recognized her familiar battle with acedia, a word she had discovered in early Church text years earlier. Fascinated by this "noonday demon", so familiar to those in the early and medieval Church, Norris knew she must restore this forgotten but important concept to the modern world's vernacular.

In this riveting biography of Elizabeth Seton, Joan Barthel tells the mesmerizing story of a woman whose life featured wealth and poverty, passion and sorrow, love and loss. "American Saint" is the inspiring story of a brave woman who forged the way for the other women who followed and who made a name for herself in a world entirely ruled by men.

A definitive, deeply moving narrative, "Bonhoeffer" is a story of moral courage in the face of the monstrous evil that was Nazism. After discovering the fire of true faith in a Harlem church, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany and became one of the first to speak out against Hitler. As a double-agent, he joined the plot to assassinate the Fuhrer, and was hanged in Flossenberg concentration camp at age 39. Since his death, Bonhoeffer has grown to be one of the most fascinating, complex figures of the 20th century. This book presents a profoundly orthodox Christian theologian whose faith led him to boldly confront the greatest evil of the 20th century, and uncovers never-before-revealed facts, including the story of his passionate romance.

In this deeply revealing and engaging autobiography, Herb Silverman tells his iconoclastic life story. He takes the reader from his childhood as an Orthodox Jew in Philadelphia, where he stopped fasting on Yom Kippur to test God's existence, to his adult life in the heart of the Bible Belt, where he became a legendary figure within America's secular activist community and remains one of its most beloved leaders.

Rodriguez is a homosexual who writes with love of the religions of the desert that exclude him. He is a passionate, unorthodox Christian who is always mindful of his relationship to Judaism and Islam because of a shared belief in the God who revealed himself within an ecology of emptiness. And at the center of this book is a consideration of women-their importance to Rodriguez's spiritual formation and their centrality to the future of the desert religions.

Jan Willis is not Baptist or Buddhist. She is simply both. "Dreaming Me" is the story of her life, as a child growing up in the Jim Crow South, dealing with racism in an Ivy League college, and becoming involved with the Black Panther Party. But it wasn't until meeting Lama Yeshe, a Tibetan Buddhist monk living in the mountains of Nepal, that she realized who the real Jan Willis was, and how to make the most of the life she was living.

Life can be full of challenges and pitfalls. In "Grace (Eventually)," Anne Lamott examines the ways we are caught in life's most daunting predicaments: love, mothering, work, politics, and maybe, toughest of all, evolving from who we are to who we were meant to be. She goes deep within her own life and feelings to describe her intimate, bumpy and unconventional journey to grace and faith.

Katie Davis traveled to Uganda for a short mission trip over the Christmas break of her senior year in high school. She found herself so moved by the Ugandan people and their needs that she knew it was her calling to return to care for them. She is now in the process of adopting thirteen children there, and has established the ministry, Amazima, that cares for hundreds more. Here, she shares her story.

Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. "My Bright Abyss," composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith--responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition--might look like.

As a Black, Latino, and former Catholic who converted to Islam, Keith Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress-from a district with fewer than 1 percent Muslims and 11 percent Blacks. With his unique perspective on uniting a disparate community and speaking to a common goal, Ellison takes a provocative look at America and what needs to change to accommodate different races and beliefs.

Part memoir, part spiritual quest, part anthropologist's mission, Benyamin Cohen's My Jesus Year is a humorous, personal, ultimately inspirational exploration of Evangelical Christianity by the son of an Orthodox Rabbi on his journey through America's Bible belt. Winner of the Georgia Writer Association's Georgia Author of the Year Award, selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books of the Year and by USA Today as one of the Top Eight Books to Help Rekindle the Hanukkah Spirit, My Jesus Year is an unorthodox and unforgettable search for universal answers and common truths.

World religion scholar Huston Smith has encountered many of the people who shaped the 20th century, including Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Aldous Huxley, and others. He was also present at many extraordinary moments in history. This is the story of his amazing life, which also serves as a travelogue and a history of change.

Muhammad's was a life of almost unparalleled historical importance; yet for all the iconic power of his name, the intensely dramatic story of the prophet of Islam is not well known. In 'The First Muslim,' Lesley Hazleton brings him vibrantly to life. Drawing on early eyewitness sources and on history, politics, religion, and psychology, she renders him as a man in full, in all his complexity and vitality.

Is there life after death? Is God real? Is there sufficient reason to live by faith? Dr. Mary Neal is a practicing orthopaedic surgeon, a wife, and a mother who has experienced joy as well as great sorrow and death. She experienced life after death and, despite her scientific training, she believes the answer to each one of these questions is a definitive yes. She drowned on a South American river and went to Heaven. She conversed with angels. She returned to Earth, in part, to tell her story to others and help them find their way back to God. In this book , Dr. Neal shares the captivating details of her life in which she has experienced not just one miracle, but many.

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history's most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first-century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor. Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers, and would-be messiahs wandered through the Holy Land, bearing messages from God. This was the age of zealotry-a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews.